Saxo Markets Review

Saxo Markets offers UK residents an excellent share dealing experience by combining the brilliant SaxoTraderGO web platform with over 30,000 international products to trade across 36 international exchanges. While Saxo Markets trails discount competitors in pricing, overall, it is our top broker for share dealing in 2020.

Top Takeaways for 2020

After spending over 100 hours testing nine online stock brokers for UK share dealing, here are our top findings on Saxo Markets:

• Saxo Markets is our #1 broker in 2020, offering an efficient trading platform, high-quality research, and a great mobile app.
• Saxo Markets offers the most extensive offering of international investments out of all brokers tested in 2020, including trading in 36 different international exchanges.
• The SaxoTraderGO platform is loaded with trading tools and offers excellent usability, regardless if you are a new or seasoned trader.
• Like the SaxoTraderGO web platform, the SaxoTraderGO mobile app is brilliant. Placing trades is quick and easy, while watchlists and price alerts sync with the main trading platform.
• Investors with the Classic account (most-common) will pay £8 per trade and €10 per month in custody fees at Saxo Markets. Overall, costs vary by trade activity and markets traded.

Overall Summary

Commissions & Fees

Saxo offers three account types: Classic, Platinum, and VIP. For simplicity, we focused on the Classic account, which requires only a £500 minimum deposit and is the base account type at Saxo. Platinum accounts require a £50,000 deposit, and VIP accounts require a £1,000,000 deposit; both come with discounted trades.

Shares trading fees: To buy and sell UK-listed physical shares, new clients default to the Classic Pricing Plan. Under this base pricing, UK traders can buy shares for 0.10% per trade (£8 min). Meanwhile, UK traders who trade on foreign exchanges are subject to different commission charges, depending on the exchange. For example, trading on the Irish Stock Exchange will cost €12 (about £10.6 ).

Beyond regular share-dealing fees, Saxo charges several other account fees traders should be aware of, including custody fees, market data subscription fees, and inactivity fees.

• Custody Fee: Saxo charges a custody fee of 0.12% per annum for any accounts holding open stock, ETF, or bond positions, with a monthly minimum fee of €10 (or the £ equivalent).
• Market Data Subscription Fee: To receive real-time market data, traders pay a monthly fee to the exchange. Fees vary depending on the exchange. For example, the London Stock Exchange basic streaming quotes (non-professional) cost £6 per month. Similarly, US exchanges (NASDAQ and NYSE) each cost $7 per month.
• Inactivity Fee: Saxo charges a fee of £25 if the account has been inactive in the previous quarter. For example, if no shares are traded during January, February, or March, a £25 fee would be charged to the account during the first week of April.

Overall Findings: Overall, Saxo's rates are only competitive for traders with a large enough balance to achieve Platinum or VIP status, or traders who trade over 100 times a month. Otherwise, the base £8 minimum per trade is average at best when compared to competitors such as IG, DEGIRO, and Interactive Investor.

When calculating annual share dealing costs, trading frequency and account balance are the two most important factors to consider. Assuming a £30,000 portfolio in traditional, taxable share dealing account, here are four scenarios of how much Saxo Markets would cost depending on trade frequency:

• 1 deal per month, 12 trades = £204 (£8 per trade + £108 in annual custody fees)
• 3 deals per month, 36 trades = £396 (£8 per trade + £108 in annual custody fees)
• 10 deals per month, 120 trades = £1068 (£8 per trade + £108 in annual custody fees)
• 20 deals per month, 240 trades = £2028 (£8 per trade + £108 in annual custody fees)

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Platforms & Tools

Saxo offers two platforms, SaxoTraderGO (web-based) and SaxoTraderPRO (desktop-based). For our testing, we focused on SaxoTraderGO, the more widely used platform of the two. SaxoTraderGO is a brilliant platform, receiving our number one ranking for 2020.

SaxoTraderGO Usability: SaxoTraderGO offers a crisp, clean design focused on usability. It's a brilliant platform. Watch lists are cleanly laid out on the left side of the platform. Watchlists link to the product overview on the right side of the platform, so clicking on a new symbol automatically refreshes the chart. Adding new stocks to a watchlist or adding price alerts is a seamless experience.

The best part of SaxoTraderGO is the speed and simplicity at which the platform operates. Going from a stock overview to charting technical indicators, and then finally placing a trade is flawless. There are no unnecessary steps or tabs, as you so often see with other UK brokers.

SaxoTraderGO Charting: With charting, a total of 49 technical indicators can be added, 17 drawing tools are available for annotations, and trades can be placed and managed directly on the chart. Seven bar types are available, and I appreciated the ability to set custom time-period views. The customization offered allows traders to identify trends efficiently.

SaxoTraderGO Mobile: The SaxoTraderGo mobile app encompasses the excellence of the desktop platform. Placing trades is quick and easy, while watchlists and price alerts synchronize over from the desktop platform. Selecting a stock from your watchlist will pull up fundamentals, a chart, and trading signals all available as a mini-menu on your screen. Almost everything from the desktop platform transfers over to the mobile app, except for some research data such as broker forecasts. All in all, the app is one of our favorites for share dealing in the UK.

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Research

While most UK-based brokers provide basic research experience, Saxo goes above and beyond, delivering research through the SaxoTraderGO platform as well as its standalone social-trading website, TradingFloor.com. The typical SaxoTraderGO quote includes a chart, news, general company information, analyst recommendations (provided by TipRanks), and fundamental data.

Research Tab: The research tab on SaxoTraderGO includes news, market analysis, an economic calendar with global events, gainers and losers for each exchange, and trade signals provided by Autochartist.

Traders who analyze global markets will love the high-level breakdown of each exchange provided in the equities section on Saxo's research platform. Investors who focus on technical analysis with be pleased with the chart patterns provided by Autochartist that identify trading signals.

TradingFloor.com: Outside of SaxoTraderGO, Saxo offers TradingFloor.com, its social community portal. On TradingFloor, traders from around the globe can share research, trade ideas, and discuss the markets. Multiple languages are supported, and traders can follow one another to track trades made. Articles and videos are both consistently posted throughout the week from the SaxoStrats team, Saxo Markets's in-house team of market strategists.

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Offering of Investments

Saxo Markets provides traders the most extensive access to international investments out of all brokers we tested in 2020. The Saxo Markets share dealing offering enables trading of over 19,000 stocks alongside 3,000 ETFs across 36 global exchanges. CFDs trading is also offered for over 9,000 products, including indices, stocks, and commodities, among others.

Saxo offers ISAs (Individual Savings Accounts), SIPPs (Self-Invested Personal Pension), Joint, Corporate, and Trust accounts to qualified UK residents. While ISA accounts have no minimum deposit requirement, SIPP accounts require £10,000 to be opened.

Education

For traders new to markets or asset classes, Saxo provides 20 interactive courses through its educational portal, Saxo Academy. Each course contains a series of videos, which concludes with a quiz to test your knowledge. For example, the course "CFDs – An Introduction" includes 21 lesson videos, a quiz, and a summary video wrapping up the course.

Rounding out Saxo Academy, clients can sign up for upcoming webinars and view archived webinars on-demand. New webinars are offered once a week, on average.

All in all, while the content is thorough, it would be nice to see Saxo add some educational articles as well.

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Final Thoughts

With clients in over 180 countries and more than one million transactions processing each day, Saxo provides its clients with a tremendous all-around trading experience.

Trading costs are not as low as some of its discount competitors. Regardless, access to international exchanges, a full suite of third-party and in-house research, and a brilliant trading platform and mobile app makes Saxo Markets our top share dealing broker for 2020.

About Saxo Markets

Saxo Markets is the UK-based subsidiary of Saxo Bank Group. Established in 1992, Saxo Bank is a Danish investment bank that provides international investors access to trading over 30,000 products covering CFDs, forex, equities, options, futures, and bonds. With its headquarters in Copenhagen and clients in over 180 countries, Saxo Bank is privately held, manages more than USD15 billion in AUM, and processes over one million transactions every day.

In this review, I focus on Saxo Markets UK Ltd, which is authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Saxo Markets has operated as an independent entity in the UK since 2006.